24-year-old Eric Clague of 43 Ramillies Road, Liverpool 18. The matter therefore became the subject of an internal police inquiry by a team that included John’s friend Pete Shotton, currently on attachment to the CID from training college. The officer was only a learner driver and so should not have been out in a car by himself. Since the police of those days were rigorous in prosecuting their own, an accusation of causing death by dangerous driving seemed likely. But no criminal charge of any kind resulted. The whole matter was dealt with by the inquest, four weeks later—though, unusually, this was conducted before a jury, and its proceedings were closed to the press.
Clague attested that he had not been driving carelessly and had been doing no more than 28-mph in the 30-mph zone. Nigel Walley, the only eyewitness, testified that Clague’s car seemed to have been travelling at abnormal speed and to have swerved out of control on the steep camber of the road as Julia suddenly stepped through the hedge. Though himself the son of a police superintendent, he sensed that the court regarded him as too young to be taken seriously. ‘The Coroner seemed to be bending over backwards to help this man who’d killed Julia,’ Mimi remembered. ‘It emerged that he was driving too fast, but you could see it was a bit of a men’s club really.’ When the young policeman was exonerated of blame, Mimi exploded in fury and threatened him with a walking stick. ‘I got so mad…That swine…If I could have got my hands on him, I would have killed him.’
The findings were reported in a further brief Echo news item:
DASHED INTO CAR
Misadventure Verdict on Liverpool Woman
A verdict of misadventure was returned by the jury at the Liverpool inquest today into Mrs Julia Lennon, aged 44, of 1 Blomfield Road, Liverpool, who died after being struck by a motor car while she was crossing Menlove Avenue on July 15.
A witness, the Coroner (Mr J.A. Blackwood) told the jury, had said that Mrs Lennon had not appeared to look either way before she walked into the roadway. Then she saw the approaching car, made a dash to avoid it, but dashed into the car.
Julia’s death left Bobby Dykins a broken man, ridden with guilt over his past drunken misuse of her and vowing tearfully never to touch alcohol again. Even after all these years, her sisters had never brought themselves to like or accept Dykins; their opinion of him now sank to rock bottom when—echoing his first panic-stricken cry to John—he announced he couldn’t cope with raising his two young daughters by Julia. The sisters’ mutual support group then swung into action to look after 11-year-old Julia and 9-year-old Jackie, much as it had for John 12 years earlier. Since Mimi had more than enough on her plate this time around, it was decided that the girls should live with their Aunt Mater and Uncle Bert in Edinburgh.
In an attempt to soften the blow, Julia and Jackie were told that their mother was merely ill in hospital, and then packed off to Edinburgh on a supposed holiday with Mater and Bert. Within a short time, however, Mater decided she had bitten off more than she could chew, and Julia and Jackie were brought back to Woolton to live with Harrie at the Cottage, having still not been told that Julia was dead. The deception somehow struggled on for weeks more, until Harrie’s husband, Norman, could bear it no longer and blurted out, ‘Your Mummy’s in Heaven.’
Unable to stay on at 1 Blomfield Road without Julia, Dykins moved to a smaller house on the outskirts of Woolton, eventually acquiring a new woman friend and a dog. But he maintained contact with his daughters and kept Harrie well supplied with money for their keep. He also continued to feel a stepfatherly obligation towards John, giving him a key to the new house and encouraging him to use it whenever he pleased. When Dykins subsequently became relief manager at the Bear’s Paw restaurant, he got John a summer job there and ensured that a large share of the tips always went his way.
However deficient the Echo’s inquest report, it at least gave Julia her proper surname. For her marriage to Alf Lennon had never been officially dissolved, any more than Mimi’s custody of John had been officially ratified. Her death in such shocking circumstances might have been expected to reconnect John with the long-absent father who nonetheless was still his legal guardian. But the family could not have got in touch with Alf even if it had wanted to.
Since leaving the merchant navy, Alf had, in his own romantic parlance, become ‘a gentleman of the road’, the once-immaculate saloon steward now a semi-vagrant whose only employment was occasional menial jobs in hotel and restaurant kitchens. He was washing dishes at a restaurant called the Barn in Solihull when his brother Sydney sent him the Liverpool Echo cutting about Julia’s death. He did not return to Liverpool until just after the following Christmas, having spent the preceding weeks in a London Salvation Army hostel recovering from a broken leg. It was at the hostel that a Liverpool solicitor finally contacted him and told him that, as Julia’s legal next of kin, he was heir to the whole of her small estate. Alf duly returned north and presented himself at the solicitor’s office, but only to give up his right to Julia’s few possessions in favour of John. He made no attempt to see or communicate with John, however, and after a few days disappeared on his travels again. His reasoning was that, thanks to Mimi’s years of propaganda, John would regard him as nothing but ‘a jailbird’.
For Mimi herself, the blow went beyond losing her sister and seeing John lose his mother. Now that John was approaching manhood, she had realised she must prepare for a time when he would longer need her. For the first time in her dutiful, self-sacrificing life, she could think of herself—and bring her relationship with Michael Fishwick into the open. Fishwick had been offered a three-year research post in New Zealand, where, as it happened, several of Mimi’s mother’s family had emigrated. Not long after George’s death, an uncle out there had died and left her a property worth £10,000. Mimi’s plan, confided to no one, had been to follow Fishwick and live with him in the house she had inherited. ‘If it hadn’t been for Julia’s death,’ Fishwick says, ‘she’d have been gone by the end of ‘58.’
Now there was nothing in the world that could have made her leave John. ‘I worried myself sick about [him] then,’ she remembered. ‘What he would turn out to be…what would happen if it was me next.’
Despite Mimi’s suspicions, police constable Eric Clague did not get off scot-free. He underwent a period of suspension from duty and, soon afterwards, resigned from Liverpool Constabulary to begin a new career as a postman. By a horrible coincidence, one of the delivery routes he was later assigned included Forthlin Road, Allerton. Many times as John sat in the McCartneys’ living room, he would have heard their afternoon mail drop onto the front doormat, little suspecting that ‘Mister Postman’ was his mother’s killer.
I was in a blind rage for two years.
I was either drunk or fighting.
Late-fifties Britain had none of the aids to coping with personal tragedy that we so depend on today. There were no family bereavement counsellors to help John come to terms with his loss; no therapists, support groups, helplines, agony aunts, confessional television shows or radio call-ins yet existed to tell him that the most private emotions are better made public and that broken hearts heal quicker if worn on one’s sleeve.
In 1958, Britons throughout the whole social scale still observed the Victorian Empire-builders’ convention of the stiff upper lip. Tears were the prerogative of females only and, for the most part, shed in decent seclusion; males were expected to show no emotion whatever. The closest members of a stricken family rarely expressed their feelings to one another, let alone to strangers. Such reticence had always been strongest in the north, strongest of all in those northern parts where privet hedge grew and hallways were half-timbered. Thus the shock and pain
